Fueled by big data, cloud computing, as well as other computer network and telecommunication applications, there is an ever increasing demand for high speed telecommunication means. High speed optical transmitters and receivers (or collectively referred to herein as “transceivers”) that are capable of exceeding a transmission rate of 25 Gbps have attracted the public's attention.
While optical transceivers are gaining popularity, semiconductor photodetector (PD) manufacturing technology is often different and sometimes even incompatible with other kinds of semiconductor device manufacturing technologies, such as those for metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) transistors. Therefore, conventional PD devices are manufactured and packaged separately from other related integrated circuits (e.g., the transimpedance amplifier (TIA) chips). This separation unfortunately has become a bottleneck for high frequency communication. To overcome this limitation, it is preferable to manufacture the PD devices and the TIA on the same chip, which is known as “monolithic integration” of PD and TIA. However, a wide variety of issues come with such monolithic integration.